“I do, but do you know that one of the main reasons I don’t go out after dark any more is because of the really huge mortgage on our one-and-a-half bedroom flat within a house?”

“Look, Bryony. Just please go on a night out so that you let off some steam and stop being a pedantic little…”

So last week, I got out of the flat, to a party in a bar (not a house). I went there eagerly anticipating chat about that ludicrous Beyoncé/Obama rumour; or, even better, some meditations on how fatherhood might change Simon Cowell. I did not go there to talk about houses, and the ever-increasing value of them. “Our home,” announced a beaming woman whom I had only met once, “is now worth £1.5 million. And we bought it 10 years ago for practically LESS THAN THE COST OF A BAG OF PEANUTS!”

Hmm, I thought. Clearly it is only rude to talk about money if you don’t actually have any.

“Well I’m so glad I’m not buying now,” said someone else, in a boast barely concealed as pity for the young. “I mean, we wouldn’t be able to afford a cardboard box, let alone the semi-detached house we got for a little under £300,000 six years ago, which, incidentally, is now worth over double that!”

Depressed that I seemed to have attended one of my mother’s drinks parties – the kind that she and my father threw back in the Nineties, because they had loadsamoney from buying a four-bedroom terraced property in 1979 for £55,000, one that was now worth approximately as much as, say, Buckingham Palace (or that’s what I thought when I was 15, listening to them harp on about the property boom) – I went to the bar to get another drink.

There, I overheard a customer sniffily joking to the waiting staff that the exceptionally large bottle of champagne behind the bar “probably cost as much as a house in Preston”. Which may have been true, say, 10 years ago, but certainly isn’t today.

This week the Office for National Statistics revealed that the average UK house price had reached £250,000 in December, putting thousands of homes into the 3 per cent stamp duty bracket. The figures showed that first-time buyers paid 7.4 per cent more for a property that month than they did at the same time just a year ago - and Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, has predicted that prices could continue rising well into 2015.

This isn’t just in London – this is everywhere. Earlier this month, an HSBC report called First Time Buyers: The New Property Path found that if you didn’t buy a property before the age of 29, it was highly likely that owning your own home would be nothing more than a pipe dream (and that this would impact on your own children’s chances of ever buying one, even a camper van). Which is dispiriting if, like me, you were 32 before you barely got a foot on that ladder – and only then because your other half happened to have had the great misfortune of a parent dying and leaving him some money.

As house prices get bigger and bigger, what my generation can afford to buy becomes smaller and smaller. I long ago gave up feeling aggrieved that I wouldn’t be able to afford the kind of house I grew up in. But it seems ridiculous to think of my daughter, 30 years down the line, unable even to buy a small flat on the outskirts of south London.

It makes me miserable to think of her, demoralised because she has failed to fulfil that most British of life requirements: owning a property. And that’s an obsession that we could do with burying under the patio (if you have one), if only to create a happier generation of children: a less envious, materialistic one. How, exactly, can we complain about kids wanting so much stuff when we are all so preoccupied with property prices?

Buying a place isn’t the be-all and end-all – in fact, what with the surveyors and lawyers, and vendors pulling out, it’s a giant pain. In mainland Europe, they don’t really bother. Perhaps that’s why they are so much more relaxed. When the boiler breaks down, they can spend their money on fine wine and steak in a nice restaurant while their idiot landlord fixes it.

Oh, I know – you can’t decorate a rented place to your tastes; but who really gives a flying fig if it means you can spend the £3,000 reserved for built-in bookcases and new carpets on good times instead? Who cares about “investing money wisely in property” when the whole thing feels like it could turn on a Monopoly dime at any moment?

Just look at Germany. It has the greatest proportion of home-renters in Europe, and it’s the fourth largest economy in the whole world.

“But an Englishman’s home is his castle!” we protest. Well, yes, but what kind of castle is a shed?

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No room for children in today’s world

Half term, and Facebook is full of people moaning about there being children everywhere – on public transport, in museums, on streets. How dare the ghastly creatures venture out! Why don’t they stay indoors, where they can be neither seen nor heard?

It’s funny, because I used to think that being single made me a pariah in other people’s eyes – and then I had a baby. Nothing makes a person’s face grow more irritated than seeing a woman wheel a buggy on to a bus. It’s as if you are expected to take a taxi or, better still, drag your newborn child and all your shopping along the street for 10 miles.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear about Victoria Poskitt, the pregnant woman who fell ill on a train but was forced to sit on the floor because no one gave up their seat. As I have written before, I only got offered two or three seats for the whole of my pregnancy. An irritation with children taking up space on public transport seems to start before they have even been born.

The other day, I heard a woman with grown-up kids moan about parents taking their babies to pubs for lunch. Was it any place to take a small child, she wondered?

Well, seeing as most pubs are now gastro-wotsits, rather than a place people chuck pints of beer around while watching the match, I don’t see why not. No one smokes in them any more. Also, isn’t “pub” just an abbreviation for public house?

It’s funny that it is widely thought that having children makes you less selfish, because judging by some of the remarks on social networks this week, you’d think the opposite was true. Come on people – weren’t we all kids once?

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It’s a hard life, being a rich superstar

The next time a sinkhole or deluge swallows up your home, remember that being exquisitely rich and successful is tough, too.

Exhibit A: Posh Spice, revealing in Allure magazine that the US is more accepting of career women than Britain, and that, subsequently, “living in America for six years was the happiest I think I have ever been”. Nothing to do with the huge mansion in sunny Beverly Hills, then.

And here we have exhibit B: Sharon Stone, who admits she once locked herself in the loo with a bottle of wine so she could have a good weep over getting old (most of us don’t bother with the privacy of the loo, preferring to do this over the kitchen table). “I said, 'I’m not coming out until I can totally accept the way I look right now.’ And I examined my face in the magnifying mirror, and I looked at my body, and I cried and cried and cried. Then I said to myself, 'You’re going to get old now. How do you want to do that?’”

With dignity? Grace? How about: without giving an interview to Shape magazine about how awful ageing made you feel, given that you happen to be one of the world’s most beautiful women?

But wait, here’s 55-year-old Sharon (on the cover of the mag in nothing but a string bikini, see-through shirt and five-inch heels) with some advice for us on how to look as good as her: “I don’t drink at all now. At a certain point, it’s better for women not to have any alcohol because it can make your face, breasts and midsection get very bloated.”

Oh do pass me a glass of Merlot and shut up, dear.

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My key role in the £3 billion Candy Crush flotation

My name is Bryony, and I am a Candy Crush addict. If you haven’t heard of this, then lucky you – and please look away now, so that you don’t get sucked in, too.

It’s a game for your smartphone or tablet that is so horribly addictive, its makers have just announced their intention to float their company, King, on the New York Stock Exchange, valuing it around £3 billion.

My husband believes that at least a third of that value could possibly be down to me.

Yes, my name is Bryony, and I am a Candy Crush addict. I actually managed to complete the whole thing, all 500 levels, so now I replay old ones “just for fun”.

At my most troublesome point, I admit, I was spending about £50 a month on it – on extra lives and cheats – though I was mildly comforted when one friend told me her rich aunt had blown a whopping £2,000.

Perhaps I would have been better off investing in Candy Crush rather than our one-and-a half bedroom flat.